Want to learn how to create great user experiences on today's Web? In this video master class, UI experts Bill Scott and Theresa Neil present design patterns for building web interfaces that provide rich interaction. Distilled from the authors' years of experience at Sabre, Yahoo!, and Netflix, these best practices are grouped into six key principles to help you take advantage of the web technologies available today. With an entire section devoted to each design principle, this class will help you:

Make It Direct: Edit content in context with design patterns for In Page Editing, Drag & Drop, and Direct Selection

Keep It Lightweight: Reduce the effort required to interact with a site by using In Context Tools to leave a "light footprint"

Stay on the Page: Keep visitors on a page with overlays, inlays, dynamic content, and in-page flow patterns

Provide an Invitation: Help visitors discover site features with invitations that cue them to the next level of interaction

Use Transitions: Learn when, why, and how to use animations, cinematic effects, and other transitions

React Immediately: Provide a rich experience by using lively responses such as Live Search, Live Suggest, Live Previews, and more

Bill Scott

Bill Scott is director of UI Engineering at Netflix in Los Gatos, CA, where he plies his interface engineering and design skills. Scott is the former Yahoo! Ajax evangelist and pattern curator for the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.

He has a long and glamorous history in the IT world, due mostly to his unique understanding of both the technical and creative aspects of designing usable products. His ramblings and musings can be found at http://www.looksgoodworkswell.com.

I'm into learning about interaction design, and the Master Class provided a lot of good information and context on the subject. I viewed the class as part of the O'Reilly blogger review program. You get a good philosophical overview of user interface and interaction design for web design. It's not to show you how to code interfaces, but from a global design perspective, what user interactions exist on different web pages, what works, what's confusing and difficult for users, etc. This is for people who are designing programs or web apps and want to understand what elements of user interaction are good for the user and what should be avoided for your project.

Some of the main points I took away are that user interaction means patterns, and anti-patterns, what works within the context of a design interaction problem and what has been used and what works and what doesn't. So, you can expect to know and understand how to apply different user interaction design principles to solve user interaction problems. Once you get through the video you'll start to look at webpages with an eye to user interaction design (incase you hadn't before). You'll likely start to get pissed off at poor design and prais elegant interaction design on webpages and software you use. You'll see the user inteaction concept from a global perspective.

As a developer I tend to (subconsciously) consider web interface design as a soft art that takes a back seat to the science of computer programming. I've long needed to brush up on my design skills and was excited to review O'Reilly's series - Scott & Neil's Designing Web Interfaces Master Class. I was hopeful of an in-depth overview of web interface design with plenty of battle-hardened nuggets of wisdom. The presenters were sufficiently credentialed to offer such nuggets of wisdom and to me, the best part of this course was Bill Scott's insight into designs from his time at Yahoo! and especially his current company Netflix extremely interesting. While I enjoyed this course and gained some knowledge in the process, I'm not sure that I – a UX rookie – learned enough for this series to live up to its master class title. I certainly don't feel like I gained mastery of the subject matter in the process. Pedantic, I know, but those were my expectations based on the title and they weren't really met by the content. The series isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination – it just didn't fully live up to my expectations.

First of all, I found that the sound's quality is not clearly audible. It was ok for the presenter but the questions from the audience were really difficult to hear. Hopefully, the content is good even if it can be improved. Also, I would like to have access to the slides to be able to have a quick overview or a reminder of each point in the presentation. For the rest of the material, the video was well captured and the slides contain a lot of interactive examples to really understand what the presenter is saying.

Bill Scott and Theresa Neil begin with an explanation of why we need to change our way of designing and how to do it. From my point of view, more time should be attributed to the "how" with more explanations on how to achieve the best results. After that, Theresa presents "15 screens layouts for designing rich applications" with concrete examples, followed by a few user interface controls. These two parts are kind of the same but it is interesting to have an overview of the most used screen layouts as a reminder when you work.

The second part of the presentation is presented by Bill and talks about "Interesting moments", "Input where you output", "require a light Footprint", "Maintain flow", "Invite interaction", "Use transition" and finally "Be reactive". This part is worth it because of Bill's rich experience and his valuable explanations. You can see his whole point with the iPad's interaction for the deletion of few mails in its native App. It is easy, in the flow, inviting, with descriptive transitions and right to the point.

Designing interfaces, in my opinion, requires a good knowledge of user interaction and design concepts which can either be obtained through experience or strong education. Although this masterclass is geared towards rich web applications, there is still much to learn for other interface designers as the controls and concepts overlap.

The videos are well structured and start off with basic concepts and starting points for designing web interfaces. I like the in-depth discussions on core subjects such as screen layout and user interface controls which serves as inspiration for building better interfaces. The video is engaging, with the panel asking questions and providing more insights but the volume of the panel is very soft and will need adjusting. This video series is highly recommended for web designers as it will help greatly in building better user interaction on your websites. It has already provided me with a wealth of knowledge and ideas for current and future projects.

The beginning is a little slow because I think the presenters are trying to lay the foundations of what's to follow by introducing the necessary concepts and vocabulary. Since the videos are meant for the general developer who doesn't necessarily have experience with web applications I think they did ok but I was a little bored in the beginning. Instead of going over 15 screen layouts I think it would have been better to focus on fewer layouts for the sake of introducing the required vocabulary and then just pointing the interested viewer to further resources.

The later videos are shorter and have smaller scope so I had a much easier time staying focused and absorbing the information. My takeaway from the videos is that the graphical design and layout of a web application shouldn't be flashy just for the sake of being flashy. It's important to remember that users want to accomplish tasks with the tools that the designers and developers give them and application developers and designers can make things easier for the users by focusing on simplicity, usability and user engagement. So it's important to maintain context and continuity when the user is performing tasks and Bill Scott, one of the presenters, provides a great example of how easy it is to derail the user's concentration by pulling the context from right underneath their feet by making the interface too flashy.

The series is full of other little usability and design nuggets so if you want to have a handy reference for some good interface design patterns then this series should serve you well.

I had the pleasure of watching Theresa Neil and Bill Scott give an master class on Designing Web Interfaces. Scott and Neil both go to great depths in explaining some of the best design patterns being used in today's online web applications. The video keeps the watcher interested by always showing great examples of good design and bad design (aka anti-patterns). Some of the examples include design patterns such as the rating systems from Netflix to recent patterns used in the Apple iPad. The most impressive feat in the video is Neil's comprehensive coverage of the 15 web design patterns. She gives examples of each design pattern and explains the pros and cons of each pattern. Eventually I could see how sometimes designers choose patterns based on other website designs without any knowledge that they are actually following a pattern.This video has also given me a few ideas on how to re-organize and design the blogs I manage as well as the IT Service Management software I've been working on in Adobe Flex. I found this video to be a must-have resource for anyone that works with the user interface of application development. While this video does not go into details on how to build these interfaces, it does arm the viewer with enough information to go out and build better designed web interfaces. I highly recommend you take time out to watch this 4 hour course on web design patterns. I'm sure you will emerge with a more keen sense for good design principles.